Pages

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

BJJ Private w/ Zapruder

So the guy doing the ceremony for my wedding is Bullshido member Zapruder who also happens to be a Brown Belt. He's in town for the wedding and staying at my place, so last night we pulled out my mats and he gave me a short private with some really handy stuff in it. I'm going to try to get it down here before I forget it.

1. Gable Grip chokes: There are 3-4 really solid variations of the Darce/Anaconda and RNC that using a gable grip instead of the more traditional grip. The principal behind them all is generally the same, to change the pinch point of the choke from the crook of your elbow to the crook where your hands meet. It's important to squeeze your elbows towards each other to finish the choke and it seems to require a little more strength on the squeeze, but more than makes up for that by being stupidly hard to defend.

2. Halfguard pass counter: The most common halfguard pass I run into is the one where your opponent bases out and turns his back on you. Apparently to counter that all you need is good timing and a backwards roll. This will require more of a shift in my focus when on the bottom of halfguard than anything else since I'm usually trying to ball up and go for old school or deep halfguard.

3. Spinning upside down triangle choke setup... thingy: So when my opponent is passing my Z-guard with their arm through my legs to block them, if I spin upside down under them it catapults me around straight into a triangle choke. It's totally pimp and I definitely need to work it since it combos well with my z-guard stuff.

4. The Saddle: My directionality was wrong. I kept getting off to the side and using my free leg to disrupt balance. What I need to do is get directly squared up so that my knee is pointed straight up the center of my opponents body and use my hips to disrupt balance.

5. Kimura/Footlock gripping: By torquing my wrists down sort of like doing wrist curls it adds an entire other dimension of pressure on the submission and allows for better/stronger finishes. In order to improve my ability to do this I need to start doing some wrist curls or something just to help strengthen my wrists further.

6. Guard retention: This was one of those things that when I saw it I just went "DOH! Why haven't I been doing that?" I normally block guard passes with my bottom foot by putting it on my opponents hip. He steps the top foot over between and then feeds the bottom foot back through. Definitely something I like and need to work on.

While we were rolling I did manage to catch him with the overhead sweep that's been working on everyone, that was awesome. He let me pass his guard a bunch and work on trying to sub him. Of course, arms like steel cable and a grip like a vise so I couldn't free anything up to actually come close to a sub, but it was fun to work against someone else who is my height with that degree of skill. He only outweighs me by about 20lbs, so I really got to see the higher level technical side from someone very much my size and build.

Tonight he's coming along to Megalodon to do a leglock class for everyone so I'll get to see him work against our bigger purple belts and blues to see how he handles them as well.